Nadine Champion

Here is what she shared with us. She learned it from martial arts, but it applies to everything. I copied it down in point form so I’ll keep it that way.

Fear = self doubt = hesitation.

Have you ever had a missed opportunity or just let it go?

Why did you let that happen?

Is there something you love: a hobby, a job, a sport?

Who do you get advice from, who is your mentor?

How did you find them?

What did they teach you?

How good are you really?

Even on your worst day, are you able to change your thinking?

You can’t blame anyone else for how you respond to a situation. Take responsibility for you. You are who you believe you are, who you say you are. But if you don’t have a strong inner sense of who you are, then who others say you are can take over your view of who you are. So don’t frame your world with little words.

Taking Yourself Seriously

This isn’t how Nadine said it, but it is what I took from it. In order to know who you are, you have to be prepared to accept who you are. To do that, you have to be able to describe yourself. And the best way to do that is to make a list of who you are and what you are good at. She asked each of us to do this and I’ll write it here so you can also have a go.

So who are you? What are you good at? Write the list:

first thing

second thing

…

…

…

It isn’t as easy as you initially think it might be. We aren’t taught to do this. We don’t teach our children to do this. We don’t teach our employees to do this. But we should. So here is how to go about it:

Start with 5. Most of us can handle 5 as a first step.

Work up to 50.

But if you really want to be a champion make it 100.

And then do it for the people you care about. Start their list for them! A pretty solid challenge for me. The Australian tall poppy syndrome fights against this sort of behaviour.

In kickboxing, it takes 10 seconds to walk from the dressing room to the ring. Many people get to the dressing room then decide not to take that 10 second walk. This is where the title of here book comes from. How often do we take some steps forward toward a goal, then step back?

She has poured everything she has learned from he mentor, Sensei Benny or Benny Urquidez. And then added her own experience of it and how it was able to help her win at something she was not sure she could.

Nadine Champion – 10 Seconds of Courage

Here are some quotes she shared.

I always thought I would sink, so I never swam (Malibu lyrics, Miley Cyrus ).

For me giving up is way harder than trying (Champion, Kayne West).

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear (Ambrose Redmond).

And she also shared how she won her second last fight carrying 3 injuries and breaking a finger during the fight. She decided that if she pulled out, she would never be able to say that she gave it everything she had. And she couldn’t win if she stepped back. So she stepped up and in and did her best. That fear did not stop here. She was not sure she could win, even had doubts about it given her injuries and lesser experience. But she won.

Nadine Champion – Wins

Another perspective she shared was that it doesn’t hurt less if you close your eyes. Pretending it isn’t happening doesn’t change the fact that it is. So you might as well keep them open and acknowledge reality. At least then you can fight back, dodge, do something. She didn’t know it at the time but this would be her second last fight because she found a lump that turned out to be cancerous and had a different battle for the next 3 years.

She has an inspiring TEDx talk titled 10 Seconds of Courage: Life Lessons from a Fighter. Definitely worth watching.

Changing the world is hard work, regardless of what you are specifically trying to do. My takeaways are:

Project Management

This post will look at an aspect of managing projects that is often overlooked. These are the steps you need to take prior to project commencement. The idea for this came from a presentation by Graeme Joy to the Casey Cardinia Business Group covering his expedition to the North Pole.

Graeme Joy with Australian Flag

Planning a Project

The thing that stood out the most from his presentation was how much of the project depended on the up front planning, and how little they could do to influence the final outcome once they set foot onto the ice.

International North Pole Expedition On The Ice

So how did they do it?

Pick the right team

If you want a High Performance Team, then every member needs to be able to carry their weight and to be able to continue to do so during the whole of the project and in cooperation with the rest of the team members. So friction is OK as long as it leads to a good outcome. In fact you need divergent view points to prevent group think settling in.

So how do you pick the team members?

International North Pole Expedition Team

Step one is that a High Performance Team needs a High Performance Leader or leadership group. The High Performance Leader has to be able to set the scene for the purpose the team exists for and also gain commitment from the team members toward that purpose. The steps include:

Vision – Create and Develop commitment within your team. Defining success and the
measurement of performance.

Empowerment – creating leaders within your organisation.

Urgency – A Sense of Urgency is critical

Communicate – You have to be an excellent communicator

Attitude – a positive attitude is more important than skill

Empathy – understand who your team are and what they are going through

Attitude is the one I want to focus on here. You can learn skills, but if your Attitude is not right, you can still fail. One example is the likelihood of survival. A trip to the north pole is entirely carried out over ice floating on top of the Arctic Ocean. Unlike Antarctica, there is no rock underneath. This carried with it 2 things I hadn’t considered until I heard Graeme Joy‘s presentation.

Progress

How do you measure progress. Easy, my current position and how much closer to the North Pole am I today compared to yesterday. Seems OK. Except I am on drifting ice. They planned on making 36km per day. One day, they travelled the distance but actually went backward by 6km due to the ice drifting. It takes quite a lot of resilience to handle that. So they made sure everyone knew in advance that it was going to happen. On the plus side, one night they got 12km closer while they slept.

Dragging Gear Over Arctic Ice

Survival Belief

The Arctic is harsh. Temperatures are low. Down to -55C. There are polar bears. There are ice floes and high winds and the real danger that their tent could be damaged. To emotionally prepare for this they practised sleeping in the open in just their sleeping bags in the high Swiss Alps so they knew they could survive in the event their tent was ripped.

Arctic Ice Tent

Engineering Application

So how does this apply to Engineering, and in particular what Successful Endeavours does, Electronics Design and Embedded Software Development? The point about Attitude is everything. Henry Ford once said, “The man who thinks he can and the man who thinks he can’t are both right“. And I agree this is the case. When we take on a project, it isn’t that we necessarily know exactly how we are going to do it, but it is with the Attitude that we will find a way. And we do. IBM statistics show that 80% of R&D projects fail. Yet we routinely succeed. It defies the statistics so how do we do it?

We recently took on 2 projects for a client who had not been able to get a solution from their current engineering services suppliers. In one case we were the 3rd business to look at the project and the project was running more than a year late. They needed to present to their end customer in 6 weeks. So how can we take on that risk given 2 other teams have failed and with a lot more time to work with?

Looking at the risks for the North Pole Expedition, surviving if the tent was damaged was managed as a psychological risk by trialling the risk management strategy before the expedition set out. This way they knew they could handle it.

In the case of the project we took on (I can’t say more because the product isn’t on the market yet) we did a quick trial and created a test rig and measured the physical parameters we would be working with and then analysed them using excel and then a program written to run on a Windows PC and trialed the solution outside the embedded environment using real data pulled from the test rig.

Simulation Example – click to see full size

So we were able to see the data we would be working with and determine that a solution could be developed based on fully understanding the problem that needed to be solved. Then we started the main development phase knowing we would be able to get to a solution. And our client had confidence to authorise the additional expenditure knowing it was likely to be a good investment this time. End result, our client was able to take a working proof of concept prototype to their end customer on the expected date. And we were able to utilise most of the mechanical engineering work already done as well as the LCD panels so they were also able to leverage some of the historical investment.

So that was the process: understand the problem, manage the risk, do the required homework, then execute with confidence.

When we hire (we are hiring now), Attitude is one of the key things I assess for. Because we can teach skills. And provide experience. But I can’t overcome a defeatist or overly risk averse mindset. And I won’t hire someone who doesn’t have a hunger for the client to succeed. We exist to support Australian Electronics Manufacturers and the primary outcome I want from each project is a local manufacturing success story.

“The man who thinks he can and the man who thinks he can’t are both right“, Henry Ford.

Graeme Joy Bio

Graeme Joy is perhaps best known as joint leader and navigator of the International North Pole Expedition, where he became the first Australian to ski to the North Pole, but he is also one of the most focused, effective and highly ranked motivational speakers in Australasia.

His extensive mastery of essential business principles such as, strategic planning, project management, conflict resolution, defining success, personality types and leadership, will answer any questions you may have and leave you feeling empowered to maximise the performance of your team.

Highly praised for his business applicability, take-home value and ability to deliver key results, Graeme Joy is also keen to share his experience with others and runs a company that conducts specialist leadership and team development programs.

The above was taken from his website. But having seen him in action, it is definitely not an exaggeration.

Australian Manufacturing Boom

I’m really pleased to announce that the growth in Australian Manufacturing last year was the biggest since the GFC. Australian Manufacturing Exports now exceed 2009 levels and it was the 2nd largest jobs growth sector in the entire Australian economy.

You can probably tell I’m pretty excited about that.

Here are the statistics:

40,000 new Australian Manufacturing Jobs in the past year

$100B in Australian Manufacturing Exports in the past year

$8B in raw Australian Manufacturing profits in the past quarter

And as covered in I Nearly Retired, Australian Manufacturing it has been expanding nearly every month for the past 22 months. I’m looking forward to August when it will be 2 straight years.

Good Marketing Generates Growth

This is part 2 of the SEBN (South East Business Networks) business breakfast held just before Christmas 2016. Here we have John Berenyi of Bergent Research sharing with us on how big a game changer good marketing can be. John is a registered psychologist with degrees in commerce and technology. He presented a series of ideas on good marketing and the profit improvements than can be achieved by using good marketing principles. This is an excerpt.

John Berenyi

A bit of research shows this is a common presentation topic for John and one that has been requested Internationally so it is worth paying attention to what he says.

Game Changing Growth

Good Marketing delivers:

increased profits

reduced sales time

reduced costs

And how does this happen? By giving your buyers what they really want! Seems simple yet my experience is that this is not as simple as it sounds.

Because in our highly marketing driven environment there are fewer dollars left on the table, giving customers what they really want leads to them buying. And it also leads to a Value Monopoly.

A good example is Harley-Davidson. They sell a Motor Bike. Or do they? Here is a quote from their head of marketing: “What we sell is the ability for a 43-year-old accountant to dress in black leather, ride through small towns and have people be afraid of him.”

So the comment about selling what people really want comes in here. They don’t want just a motor bike. They want a motor bike with attitude. They want benefits beyond, speed, fuel consumption and reliability. In this case, image.

And there is a formula for this.

Value Monopoly = (pQ x Eb) / (P + rT)

Value Monopoly in Detail

Where:

pQ = perceived quality

Eb = ego boost

P = price

rT = relative time to acquire

So price is important but it is a long way from being the whole game. However if you are more expensive and can’t justify it, then you have a big issue. From the above you can see that reducing price only helps if they can get it quickly or either the perceived quality or ego boost go up. When did reducing price ever increase the ego boost or perceived quality?

So this is an interesting formula. You can increase your value monopoly mostly by increasing the perceived quality, increasing the ego boost associated with the product (for the buyer type), making it quicker to get, or making the price lower. Amazon have gone with the quick to get and lower price strategy. Most of the products aren’t theirs so they are stuck with the ego boost of the market, and the same goes for the perceived quality. So they have primarily tackled the terms on the bottom line. An exception is a product like the Kindle where they also went for perceived quality. So 3 of the 4 terms.

Back to price. On price you have these 5 buyer types:

Budget buyer

Negotiator

Specials junkie

Bang for buck with every feature

Dream buyer (their dream, not yours)

We are all like this but which type of buyer we are depends on the product category. Studies show that budget buyers are only 10% of the market. This also applies to your customers. So again, just selling on price is a mistake unless it is that 10% you are specifically going after.

But how do you find out what type of buyer each prospect is?

Here is where the problem comes from when you try to find out what type of buyer you are dealing with:

They don’t know

They can’t tell you because they don’t have the language / concept

They won’t tell you because they are either embarrassed or have some other reason

Ultimately, if you understand what your customers really want and can communicate what you offer so they get it, then you will sell a lot more of the same product. But you will also need to look at understanding what they really want, and not just what they say they want.

Here is a list of recurring reasons for buying a house:

Make my sister really jealous

Prove to mum and dad that I’m responsible

Prove how successful we’ve become

Let me be popular for once

Make my family love me

Show my life’s work is worth something

I want to feel in control

Keep my marriage together

Prove emigration was good idea

As a real estate agent, it would be helpful understand the current buyer so you can offer them something they want. But they are unlikely to be open about it up front. And to everyone wants to be sold to the same way. We all have a disposition in how we are sold to. Not everyone wants their agent to be their best friend. Not everyone wants efficiency. Here is an example of some ways people think about the salesperson they want to deal with.

Buying Disposition

All of the above fits my concepts of good marketing. So lots of stuff to think about there. I hope you found this helpful as you are considering how best to navigate 2017.

My thanks go to John Berenyi for making his slide deck available from the morning. Most of the graphics came from that.

Australian Manufacturing PMI

The Australian Manufacturing PMI is a measure of the manufacturing economy in Australia. A score above 50 means it is growing and a score below 50 means it is shrinking. I recently reported in the post about out new location that we had been in growth for the past 17 months but according to one data source we missed out for a couple of months during that time. For the history see:

Design Led Innovation

Traditional Product Development comes up with the product idea, does the development, gets it into production and then tries to find customers to sell it to.

Design Led Innovation tries to turn that process around so the actual needs of the customer or user become part of both the product definition and the business model development. If you haven’t already heard of it, check out the Business Model Canvas.

I get the opportunity to present on topics like Innovation to Business Groups and even MBA programs and one of the interesting statistics I use is that the number one area for Innovation in the world today is the Business Model.

How Does Design Led Innovation Work?

So how does this all work?

Design Led Innovation Process

In Design Led Innovation, the expected outcome is that when you engage with your customer, and begin to understand their needs, then you can start to offer them something that has much higher value for them and allows you to get a better price for offering that much higher value. The outcome is the classic win:win that great business is meant to deliver. And it is a key factor in not getting caught in the classic commodity service price war with the client’s purchasing officer driving the process.

It is also a continuous process. One description is that it is like “rebuilding the plane while it is in flight”.

Sounds scary, but the results seem to show it is well worth doing.

Design Led Innovation session at SEBN

At a recent SEBN breakfast session we heard from Tricomposite about their experience of using Design Led Innovation to revolutionise their business and not only service their existing customers better, but offer them products they didn’t even know they wanted and create a much better value offering for them than they had ever considered before. And this has opened up potential market offerings to other customers who they would never have considered they could work with.

Here are the themes they explored in finding this offering:

focus on designers, not buyers

test is time pressure leads to design mistakes

test is rapid full-sized final material prototypes were valuable

test if there was room for service level agreements

test if there was room for collaborative design

And the answer to 4 of these was a resounding yes. Only the service level agreement test failed. Basically, customers expect service as a given. But the rest has opened up a complete rethink of their business. In fact, they shared that it was their existing perspective on their business that proved to be their biggest limiting factor.

Business Model Canvas

Rethinking the Business Model is a key component of Design Led Innovation. But not as an end in itself. Only after understanding your customer’s real needs can you determine how to make it easier to do business with them.

I recommend getting the Business Model Canvas book and taking advantage of the free downloads at Strategyzer. Here is a example of one of their tools.

Above is a shot of the front of the building. On street parking is available. A recent security upgrade means that there is no longer access to the rear of the building for guest parking.

Once you get inside the building (doors at front and rear) you take the lift to the first floor and then head along the corridor to your right and round the bend to the left. There will be signage on the front glass doors.

And here are some inside shots.

Just before the fit out was complete.

Successful Endeavours – Inside – Fit Out Nearly Complete

First load of furniture arrives on Saturday.

Successful Endeavours – Inside – First Furniture Delivery

After the final load of furniture arrives and is assembled.

Successful Endeavours – Inside – Furniture Delivered

Monday morning we move the furniture into place and start setting up.

Successful Endeavours – Inside – Up And Running

And by Monday lunch time, we are operational again.

Australian Manufacturing Continues To Grow

I’m really looking forward to being able to build the team and do more product development for manufacturers in Australia. Australian manufacturing has grown every month for the past 17 months so this isn’t just us, there are lots of other businesses growing; something I am particularly pleased to be able to report. It continues the trend I wrote about in July 2016 in Australian Manufacturing is Growing.

Digital Tomorrow is Today

The future is already here. The digital revolution has happened. So what about tomorrow?

This is the question Chris posed to the room at the start of his presentation.

Chris asserts that the technological revolution has already happened. Now it is Velocity that counts. So what does Velocity mean?
In Software Development, Velocity refers to the rate with which you are completing a project. If Velocity is too low, you will not finish on time. Ideally Velocity is above the original planned value and you will deliver ahead of schedule. At the very least, this allows you time to test comprehensively. Projects running late often compromise on test in order to save time. This tactic usually adds time in the long run.

His first example was OTTO. This is a start-up of ex Google employees who are developing self-driving track technology that can be retrofitted to existing trucks. So you don’t need to design a new vehicle, you can add their system to your existing fleet. They have early adopted product in the market (delivering beer via self-driving trucks) and hope to be fully market ready in 9 months. And uber bought OTTO. This rapid time to market is an example of the increasing Velocity available today.

OTTO self-driving truck

A local example we are working with is Maintabase. This is a Melbourne based start-up that came to us 2 months ago with some “off the shelf” hardware to try and configure it as a demonstration of their asset management concept where you can monitor machine cycle and operating time automatically and identify when maintenance points will be reached. Like OTTO, this can be retrofitted to any existing machine. They were trying to use “off the shelf hardware” for good reason; low development cost. However the hardware was difficult to configure and use, not very flexible, and ultimately not what they wanted in a final product. It was never going to do what they needed and was only ever an interim measure. So we created the product they need and they are launching it at Future Assembly in the IoT Category. See Future Assembly – IoT – Maintabase for more details. So idea to launch in 8 weeks!

Maintabase

And then there is Tesla who have reinvented the modern passenger automobile and already offer autonomous cars.

Tesla

And now a medical example. 23 and Me will send you a DNA kit. You provide a saliva sample in the test tube they provide. They then send you a detailed report describing your genetic ancestry, what health issues you will expect have in the future and even what kind of children you will have with your partner (you need 2 samples for that). This was banned in the USA due to concerns about how to regulate it so they moved to Europe and launched there. Now they are also able to operate in the USA. 5 years ago a service like this would have been prohibitively expensive. Now it is a very affordable tool to allow you to manage your life better.

23 and Me – Welcome to You

We also see the huge burst of activity in Wearables that allow you to quantify things like quality of sleep, activity level and a whole range of health and other indicators. The Quantified Self requires measurement and these devices do a good deal of that already.

Lean Digital Start-Up

Computing technology is also changing so rapidly that you can do a hugely scalable start-up in a shed. This is technology going full circle. HP started in a shed. So did Google and Apple. The shed may become the new business launch model.

This allows a new class of business opportunities lumped under the banner of the Lean Start-Up. I’ve added “Digital” to the mix because there is a lot of emphasis now on being able to scale quickly. So we have the Lean Digital Start-Up. So low investment, low risk, potentially huge upside, potentially scalable. The failure rate of Lean Digital Start-Ups is unfortunately also huge. About 25 times the failure rate of conventional businesses. The risk due to failure is much lower and they can pivot rapidly. This is Agile applied to the Business Model.

Old world businesses are like huge plantations and have a specific focus and everything is about optimising that focal point. By comparison, the new business paradigm is like hacking your way through a rain forest looking for a breakthrough plant or animal that holds the cure to something incurable. The latter is a much more chaotic process and results are unpredictable.
Access to technology means that even mobile phone calls and SMS are old hat and is all about video, high speed data sharing and experience.

The Future – What Next?

BMW have just celebrated 100 years in business. That is a great achievement. If you go back 50 years, it was all about the product, the technology, the reliability. Today it is all about the experience. And they are talking about selling transportation services rather than vehicles in 10 years time.

Super Fluidity is now the norm. You can transfer data almost instantly to anywhere in the world. Today you can design a product , send the file somewhere else on the planet and have it 3D printed . You can now 3D print food. Oreos can be custom designed by you and then made for you and shipped to your address.

Why is Google self driving cars happening? Google do search and other data stuff. The answer from Google is that a driver-less car is a mechanical problem that needs an information solution. And Google are an information solution company.

Why is Lego still in business? It is a plastic block. Easy to copy and many have done it. Yet today they are the most influential toy company in the world. Everything is about the user. You can design your own kit, select the blocks, buy it and have it delivered to your door. You can build it on screen, have it 3D rendered and sent to your device to show or share with your friends.

Apple have enough cash on their books to pay out Greece’s national debt 3 times over and still run their business for a year even with no sales. And they did it by making their product easy to use and putting a full ecosystem together to support the user.

Air bnb, uber, Spotify and many other companies are leveraging great user experiences and offering great value.

We are headed into an era of no screens, augmented reality and where the world is your screen and data is your overlay.

Pretty exciting times lay ahead as we catch up with the capability the Digital Revolution already lays before us.